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The Museum’s Collections document the fate of Holocaust victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others through artifacts, documents, photos, films, books, personal stories, and more. Search below to view digital records and find material that you can access at our library and at the Shapell Center.

Ernie M. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4134) interviewed by Rivie Zeiler

Oral History | Fortunoff Collection ID: HVT-4134

Videotape testimony of Ernie M., who was born in Cologne, Germany in 1916, one of three children. He recounts his father was an American citizen, thus he was as well; attending Jewish school; working as an auto mechanic; participation in Habonim; becoming a counselor at a Youth Aliyah camp outside of Berlin; police confiscating the identification papers of everyone there in November 1938; traveling to Berlin; arriving on Kristallnacht; observing Jews being beaten and synagogues burning; visiting a friend who had just been released from a concentration camp; returning to the youth camp; learning their United States citizenship had expired; a relative in the U.S. having it renewed; obtaining passports which were valid for six weeks; reluctance to leave his future wife who worked at the youth camp; brief retention with five colleagues by the Gestapo in Frankfurt an der Oder; his sister visiting them at the camp from Stockholm; his future wife traveling to Stockholm with his sister's husband, posing as his sister; meeting her there; marriage in March 1939; his emigration to the United States; obtaining papers for his wife; and her journey to New York via Moscow, Japan, and the west coast of the United States.

Learn about over 1,000 camps and ghettos in Volume I and II of this encyclopedia, which are available as a free PDF download. This reference provides text, photographs, charts, maps, and extensive indexes.